alt Hacker NewsMy honest take is: in an ideal world it should become possible to unsubscribe through our bank.
This also would prevent any dirty trick from companies trying to obfuscate unsubscribing.
Replies
In the UK you already can for anything done via "Direct Debit", which covers a lot of regular payments.
You can in Europe, e.g: https://wise.com/help/articles/1CoZht05rHDEJcycXU2RMh/what-a...
Is "not paying" effectively the same thing as unsubscribing?
I guess they could keep providing you the service and keep track of the debt you "owe" them. Once it becomes high enough they would find ways to claim the money.
This is possible in Australia via the new PayTo system. But it’s quite new, doesn’t work for international payments and so far not much uses it.
This needs to be augmented with a new bit of contract law which enables a new type of 'subscription' where the terms are set by law.
Those terms would include things like "payments are monthly, service automatically ends when payments end, etc."
As things stand today, plenty of consumers end subscriptions by blocking payment, which practically works, but opens the doors to a scumbag company bulk chasing all those unpaid subscriptions through the courts and getting leins on millions of homes for $150 each and templated court cases.
We can already through PayPal, making it easy to unsub. But, guess what, service providers don't like that. Equally they'd not like a bank's solution.
However the payment card companies could handle this by facilitating subscriber to generate a new virtual card for each sub, then to cancel sub, cancel card. They'd need to qualify the current T&Cs which pass a charge through regardless.